"Don't worry, Oak; even if she does walk out of this apartment, my men
will be following her wherever she goes. I'd have a report within one
minute after she left."
I nodded, apparently satisfied. "I've been relying on that," I said.
"Otherwise, I'd have followed her to the door."
He chuckled and looked pleased.
Ten minutes after that, even he was beginning to look a little
worried. "Maybe we'd better go check," he said. "She might have hurt
herself or ... or become ill."
Midguard looked flustered. "Now, just a minute, colonel! I can't allow
you to just barge in on a young girl in the ... ah ... bathroom.
Especially not Miss Ravenhurst."
Brock made his decision fast; I'll give him credit for that.
"Get Miss Pangloss on the phone!" he snapped. "She's just down the
corridor. She'll come down on your orders."
At the same time, he got to his feet and made a long jump for the
door. He grabbed the doorpost as he went by, swung himself in a new
orbit, and launched himself toward the front door. "Knock on the
bathroom door, Oak!" he bawled as he left.
I did a long, low, flat dive toward the bedroom, swung left, and
brought myself up sharply next to the bathroom door. I pounded on the
door. "Miss Ravenhurst! Jack! Are you all right?"
No answer.
Good. There shouldn't have been.
Colonel Brock fired himself into the room and braked himself against
the wall. "Any answer?"
"No."
"My men outside say she hasn't left." He rapped sharply on the door
with the butt of his stun gun. "Miss Ravenhurst! Is there anything the
matter?"
Again, no answer.
I could see that Brock was debating on whether he should go ahead and
charge in by himself without waiting for the female executive who
lived down the way. He was still debating when the woman showed up,
escorted by a couple of the colonel's uniformed guards.
Miss Pangloss was one of those brisk, efficient, middle-aged
career-women who had no fuss or frills about her. She had seen us
knocking on the door, so she didn't bother to do any knocking herself.
She just opened the door and went in.
The bathroom was empty.
Again, as it should be.
All hell broke loose then, with me and Brock making most of the
blather. It took us nearly ten minutes to find that the only person
who had left the area had been an elderly, thin man who had been
wearing the baggy protective clothing of a maintenance man.
By that time, Jack Ravenhurst had been gone more than forty minutes.
She could be almost anywhere on Ceres.
Colonel Brock was furious and so was I. I sneered openly at his
assurance that the girl couldn't leave and then got sneered back at
for letting other people do what was supposed to be my job. That
phase only lasted for about a minute, though.
Then Colonel Brock muttered: "She must have had a plexiskin mask and a
wig and the maintenance clothing in her purse. As I recall, it was a
fairly good-sized one." He didn't say a word about how careless I had
been to let her put such stuff in her purse. "All right," he went on,
"we'll find her."
"I'm going to look around, too," I said. "I'll keep in touch with your
office." I got out of there.
* * * * *
I got to a public phone as fast as I could, punched BANning 6226, and
said: "Marty? Any word?"
"Not yet."
"I'll call back."